Oviparous Animal Life Cycles Update-{Butterflies}

A couple weeks ago we studied oviparous animal life cycles in our classroom, and as part of that study, we received five painted lady caterpillars from InsectLore.

We watched those caterpillars for weeks continue to grow bigger and to enclose themselves into their chrysalides. This week we had our butterflies emerge from their chrysalides, and as soon as their wings were dried off, we took them outside to release them.

(Side story: One of our butterflies had actually gone belly up at one point today, and I had to have the conversation with my students that he didn't make it because I, of course, didn't notice that it was belly up until I let my students go look at the butterflies. I decided that in order to keep the others alive until we could release them later today that I would put a piece of a peach that I had in there with them. I placed the peach in their netting and that butterfly flipped itself over and began walking around and went straight to the piece of peach, which made my class cheer. It was like witnessing a resurrection. I realized at that very moment that the poor butterfly was probably near death due to starvation. Moral of the story, put fruit in the netting BEFORE the butterflies emerge from their chrysalides. Whoops!)

We did notice that one of the butterflies had lost one of it's back wings when emerging from it's chrysalis, so it was unable to fly properly. I found a nice spot near our school with lots of flowers to place it, in hopes that it will continue to live. Fingers crossed!

One of the other butterflies didn't want to leave us. He landed on me for awhile and then on a student's brightly colored shoe. My class loved getting up close looks at these beautiful creatures. 

At the end of the day, all five butterflies had been released into the wild, hopefully to live and thrive on their own.

Five for Friday-{Wrapping Up a Fun Week with Butterflies}

It's that time again, folks! I'm linking up with Kacey at Doodle Bugs Teaching.

If you follow my blog at all, you know that this past week has been our oviparous animal life cycle theme study. We spent one day this week learning all about what oviparous animals are, one day learning all about the life cycle of frogs, two days learning about the life cycle of chicks and hatching our very own chicks in class, and today we studied the butterfly life cycle. We began our study of the butterfly life cycle by reading two books, Butterfly by Susan Canizares and How to Hide a Butterfly & Other Insects by Ruth Hellers. The book Butterfly was a good introduction into what the butterfly life cycle looked like and how it went, while the How to Hide a Butterfly & Other Insects book was more for entertainment purposes because it talks about how insects use camouflage and the kids loved looking for the insects that were hidden on the pages. 

Can you find the butterfly hidden on this page? 

We also had our Scholastic weekly reader that was all about butterflies that we read. We learned a new vocabulary word, symmetrical, and did a short craft to reinforce the term.

 For the craft, we folded a piece of paper in half...

 drew half of a butterfly...

Cut the half of the butterfly out with the paper still folded, and then opened it up to find that it was a full butterfly!

 We then took paint and painted a design on one side...

 folded the paper again...

 and, voila! A perfectly SYMMETRICAL butterfly.

After reading the books, we turned to our iPads to create our own digital book of the butterfly life cycle using the Book Creator app. Notice how the students used their new learning of symmetrical when drawing their butterflies! I am one proud Kinder teacher right now!

{The Book Creator app has endless possibilities as far as uses in the classroom, and making a book is just one obvious one. If you have any devices in your classroom, I highly recommend this app!}

After last recess on Fridays, I most typically have some sort of snack to give my students. We are so busy during the other days of the week with that we don't have time to implement a snack on any other days other than Friday, so Foodie Friday has become a norm for us in room 103. Today our snack was all about the butterfly life cycle. {Thank you once again, Pinterest!}

Here is what I bought for the snack activity. 

*Pepperidge Farm Pretzel Thins... they are in the shapes of butterflies!!!! I'm not sure if they typically come this way, or if it is a seasonal thing, but I was super pumped either way.

*Kroger brand sour gummy worms 

*A bag of the Tootsie Rolls (not the long ones, but the small, normal sized ones.)

*Great Value brand mini marshmallows.

I passed out their life cycle paper plates and put one of each snack in the middle of the plate.

 Then they had to put them in the correct order of the butterfly life cycle.

The finished product...

We also FINALLY got our caterpillars in from Insect Lore, and they couldn't have come on a more perfect day than the day we were learning about the butterfly life cycle. The class was excited to see some silk inside the cup of caterpillars after we had just learned that they made their chrysalis' out of silk they make, similar to a spider.

Can you spot the silk?

Phew, what a week! I have thoroughly enjoyed the past two weeks of learning and craziness. I sure am looking forward to this weekend though. I hope all of you have a great weekend!

Oviparous Animal Life Cycles-{Day 3: All About Chicks}

Umm, I thought yesterday was busy, but gee whiz! Today was even busier! Sure makes for a fast day though, so I'm not really complaining. ;) 

Today we learned all about chicks and the chicken life cycle, and we couldn't have picked a better day to begin studying them because our chicks started to hatch this morning! Here is how our day went...

We began our chicken life cycle study by getting on the MyOn app on our iPads (have I ever mentioned how much I love that each of my students have a device?!) and listening to the story Hatching Chicks. The story talked about hatching eggs in a classroom. How perfect could that be, right? {If you haven't heard of the app MyOn, do yourself a favor and go check it out RIGHT NOW!...or after you finish reading about our chick day.)

We also listened to the story Chickens. Both stories offered great information on chickens and their life cycle, and was a great introduction into our chicken activities.

After everyone finished listening to the two stories, we met at the rug where we have all of our meetings and completed a can, have, are chart on chicks as a whole group.

We then discussed the chicken life cycle and how a chicken begins as an egg, then a chick hatches from the egg and grows into an adult chicken. We then drew and labeled the life cycle, which was then turned into an adorable chick craft I created. Click here to get this activity for yourself.

You can definitely tell we are learning all about oviparous animals just from looking at my hallway, huh? 

Like I said before, along with all this chicken life cycle learning, we also had our chicks begin to hatch today. When I left the school, we had three chicks, one cracked egg, and two eggs that have yet to do absolutely anything. My kiddos, and I, were SO excited about these sweet chicks hatching and it made the entire day full of excitement. We look forward to the rest of the chicks hatching and all of them "drying out" so that we can get our hands on them! :) 

Tomorrow we will continue our chick discussion, and we hope that we will get to play with our chicks. Friday we will begin our learning of the butterfly life cycle. Check back later to get the low down on the end of our life cycle week.